During her time at La Mesa, Sister Antonia befriended both the powerful and the powerless. When the government gave her the concession to sell soft drinks to the prison’s 5,500 inmates, she used the money to pay bail for first-time offenders, and to pay for inmates’ dental care.

“She was called the ‘Tooth Fairy of Tijuana,’” Sister Anne Marie Maxfield recalled Thursday. In addition to bringing numerous dentists in to treat prisoners over the years, if she saw a vendor on the street with bad teeth, she would stop and give him the phone number of a dentist who would fix his teeth for free, Maxfield said.

“She understood the relationship between appearance and anti-social behavior,” said Marie Olesen, who assisted her husband with surgical procedures to remove tattoos and other acquired or congenital deformities. “She didn’t see evil. She didn’t see negativity. She saw only people who needed help.”

She grew closely connected to many in law enforcement, comforting the family of a Tijuana police chief, Alfredo de la Torre, who was shot to death in 2000.

Following the assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, she was one of the few with access to the suspect, Mario Aburto Martinez, at the Almoloya de Juarez Prison outside Mexico City. The suspect’s mother had asked Sister Antonia to accompany her on the visit.

Four years later, following the El Sauzal massacre that claimed the lives of 19 men, women and children, Sister Antonia comforted the two survivors, a pregnant 15-year-old girl and her 11-year-old cousin.

In 1997, she founded the Sisters of the Eleventh Hour of St. John Eudes, a Roman Catholic order for older single or divorced women who devote their lives to the poor. Their house near the prison, Casa Campos, was purchased for Sister Antonia by Rigoberto Campos Salcido, a drug trafficker whom Sister Antonia had met at the prison and who was shot to death after his release.

Sister Antonia’s philosophy was simple, and surprisingly effective: “Live within the day,” she once said. “Forget about yesterday; it’s over. Take everything bad and negative and toss it away. Learn to step out from what is holding you back.”

She is survived by seven children — James, Kathleen, Theresa, Carol, Tom, Elizabeth and Anthony.